School leaders must make decisions and implement strategies to improve a school climate and student achievement, and it benefits them to understand which areas of school climate have the greatest impact on student achievement. The State of Georgia measures school climate and student achievement with its school accountability measure, the College…

Studies of charter closure rates typically focus on year-to-year closures. While important for researchers, such studies provide little guidance to families seeking to understand the risk of enrolling their child in a charter school. That is because studies determining how many schools close each year provide no information on how long the school…

After years of school improvement efforts to include Georgia's four hundred-million-dollar Race to the Top grant, Georgia's elementary, middle, and high schools have failed to significantly improve schoolwide student achievement. This qualitative portraiture study focused on three successful principals of previously chronically failing Title I…

Liberty Elementary School is a school of 1,110 kindergarten through fifth-grade students in Canton, Georgia. As a 2018 National School of Character, Liberty Elementary is continuously working to maintain a culture of character while celebrating being only the third school in Georgia to be named a National School of Character. In this article, the…

Best practice in gifted and talented identification procedures involves making decisions on the basis of multiple measures. However, very little research has investigated the impact of different methods of combining multiple measures. This article examines the consequences of the conjunctive ("and"), disjunctive/complementary…

The purpose of this qualitative study using a phenomenological approach was to identify and examine factors influencing the retention rate of special education teachers in rural and urban schools in middle Georgia. Provided in this study are factors that are related to retention in special education teachers. Semistructured interviews were used to…

This mixed methodology study investigated the relationship between administrator and teacher perceptions of leader decision making regarding five variables (reading training, reading curriculum, program evaluation, financial support, and student assessment) and student achievement (in the single content area, reading, at the 3rd grade level) in…

There is excitement in the air at Clarke Central High School in anticipation of a $28 million renovation planned on its 27-acre, urban campus located just minutes from the University of Georgia in Athens. This extensive construction aims to fulfill a board of education mandate to provide equity among the Clarke County school facilities and will…

Education, a fundamental privilege in America, has been deemed the great equalizer that should afford each individual access and opportunity (Hale, 2004). However, research has proven that for many students of color, the American dream is simply a nightmare. Many minority students have lagged behind academically, failing to graduate and failing to…

This study examines fourth grade student achievement in relation to teacher perceptions of principal leadership and other selected variables in a large urban school district in Georgia. Student achievement was measured by performance on the Georgia Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT) during the 2004-05 and 2005-06 school years. The…

In this short article, the author discusses how Henderson Middle School in Jackson, Georgia used shared decision making to improve student achievement through the use of laptop computers. With effective use of technology and shared decision making, administrators at Henderson believe that they can continue to achieve Adequate Yearly Progress under…

This study examined connections between staff development and student achievement in order to develop a base of knowledge for improving Georgia's staff development. The study asked whether differences in how districts and schools provided staff development for teachers accounted for some of the variation in student achievement across Georgia…

The first part of this report contains a case study from each of the eight southern states participating in a late 1970s project which focused primarily on the organization of rural counties for making decisions that affect the well-being of county residents. In the second section, the study counties (identified as low income in 1950) are placed…

This report provides summary statistics on the entering freshmen classes of the 34 state institutions of higher education in the University System of Georgia, and is intended to assist in advising prospective students concerning their probable success in college. The formulas for predicting average freshmen grades (AFG) are intended primarily for…

The Georgia League of Professional Schools is a school and university collaborative formed to support school renewal. It currently includes 54 elementary and secondary schools and the University of Georgia. Schoolwide action research is simply cooperative disciplined inquiry within a framework that provides some structures for working together.…